Bill Ames defends State’s history standards

Bill Ames, a former member of a review team that helped develop the Texas high school social studies curriculum standards, remains a stout defender of the standards.

The controversial standards are still being debated. Some House GOP leaders earlier this month suggested the State Board of Education reopen the process to fix the more contentious standards. House Appropriations Chairman Jim Pitts, R-Waxahachie, speculated that lawmakers would not appropriate hundreds of millions of dollars for new textbooks as long as the standards are so controversial.

But down in the fine print we find that the lone Congressional Democrat calling for impeachment is Dennis Kucinich ……..

Misleading? Absolutely.

Irresponsible reporting? Yes.

And you would never see such a misleading headline about Obama in the leftist, biased San Antonio Express-News or the Houston Chronicle.

But the headline writers at the Express-News and the Chronicle have freely applied their double standard to create similar headlines concerning the social studies curriculum standards approved by the State Board of Education in May 2010.

As it turns out, the only GOP dissenters called out in the article are two proven RINOs, Jim Pitts of Waxahachie and Charley Geren of Fort Worth. A third legislator, House Public Education Committee chairman Rob Eissler, was misquoted and in fact has since publicly stated that he supports the standards.

The article conveniently ignores that the vast majority of Texas’ GOP legislators support the standards, led by Rep. Wayne Christian and his 40+ members of the Texas Conservative Coalition. But the media cannot be bothered by facts that dispute their agenda.

Further, the two newspapers feature a highly negative report by the formerly conservative-leaning Fordham Institute as the final arbiter, a report that bashes the Texas standards on a number of fronts.

However, the article did not reveal information documented in an open letter to the Fordham Institute, showing that the organization has effectively sold itself to the highest bidder.

The Bill Gates Foundation awarded $35 million to various government organizations to promote Obama’s Common Core Standards, and also awarded $1.4 million to the Fordham Institute, also to promote the standards. Could there be any doubt that Fordham would bash the independently created Texas standards? Follow the money trail….

The Fordham Institute’s critique of the Texas standards follows the liberal left’s pattern of political correctness, first established as 1960s radicals hijacked the education establishment and its curriculum standards. There are basic axioms: (1) History cannot speak negatively about minorities, only about whites. (2) Democrats and liberals are to be positively portrayed, Republicans and conservatives negatively. (3) Socialist, globalist principles are good, free enterprise and patriotic principles are bad.

The excerpts from the Fordham report in the articles clearly demonstrate these axioms.

Internment: Fordham contends that German and Italian internment was “comparatively trivial” compared to Japanese internment. The fact is that Japanese internment has historically been trumpeted by leftist educators as yet another example of American racism. Always ignored has been the fact that significant numbers of German and Italian American citizens were detained as well. This fact has been papered over by the left, since the internment of whites of Europeans descent raise the level of the whole internment issue from one of white racism to one of national security.

Policy:Fordham contends that “students are explicitly urged to condemn federal entitlement programs and to mistrust international treaties”. Uh, the standard about entitlements reads, “discuss the solvency of long-term entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare”. Condemnation? Hardly. Stimulation of critical thinking? Certainly. As for international treaties, the standard reads, “evaluate efforts by global organizations to undermine U.S. sovereignty through the use of treaties”. I wonder if the Fordham folks are aware of the International Criminal Court, where an American citizen can be kidnapped in a foreign county and be tried and convicted in the Netherlands for crimes, without U. S. Constitutional protection? Is Fordham aware of the Kyoto treaty, whose supporters acknowledge no improvement in global temperatures, but call anyway for massive wealth transfers from the U. S. to the third world? Texas students need to be aware of the dangerous efforts of anti-American, global organizations.

McCarthyism: McCarthyism has always been a whipping boy for communist-sympathizing leftist historians. They ignore that the FDR and Truman administrations were overrun with Soviet agents: Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White, State Department Office Of Special Political Affairs Alger Hiss, White House assistant to the President Lauchlin Currie and top scientists in the Manhattan Project.” – Jerold & Leona Schecter to name just a very few.

Discrimination and Civil Rights: This item is most telling regarding historian axioms of bias. Fordham whines that the standards do not condemn whites: No Black Codes, No KKK, no Jim Crow. But consistent with protecting minorities, they do not complain that the standards do not include that black rioters burned many of their cities in the years during and following civil rights legislation. Further, the questioning of Democrats opposition to civil rights, contending that they were “closet Republicans” because their southern successors defected to that party some 30 years later, is an absurdity that even they should be ashamed of.

The articles close with Democrat Senator Kirk Watson claiming that the standards create a “credibility crisis”.

Credibility crisis? Because the SBOE has not allowed a serious revisionism of history to occur? Because the SBOE refused to rewrite history to accommodate demands based solely upon changing student demographics?